The 4 Stupidest Ways Credit Cards 'Reward' You for Spending

Each year of my childhood, a group of middle-aged men would come to my school and give every kid the chance to sell magazine subscriptions in exchange for prizes from a catalog. What at first seemed like an opportunity at entrepreneurship turned out to be pretty blatant child labor. In order to get a boom box or a bicycle or anything good, we would have to sell roughly 1,100 subscriptions. The prizes for selling a more reasonable but still ambitious number of subscriptions, like 15, were so sad, even arcades were too embarrassed to carry them.

Getty"Guess who rolled a perfect game of skeeball, bitches!"

The point is, those middle-aged men took advantage of my fundamental misunderstanding of value, and while I swore that I'd never get suckered by that kind of duplicity again, I realized recently that I was falling for nearly an identical scam as an adult, this time orchestrated by the middle-aged men in the credit card rewards racket.

At some point, banks figured out that as much as people like low interest rates, no annual fees and an online payment system, what we really go berserk for are prizes. We love the idea of getting new stuff, especially when we don't have to do anything to earn that stuff except buy other stuff. We will dive head first into bankruptcy if it means getting a "free" leaf blower, regardless of whether we have any leaves to blow, simply because it feels like a bonus. And even though some banks offer useful prizes like airline miles or cash back to try to coax us into spending more than we can afford, they've also figured out that it doesn't really matter what they offer as long as they call it a "Reward." That's why your bank will present to you, without any hint of sarcasm, the offer to cash in your points on polished hunks of garbage like ...

#4. This Fucking Candle Holder

Either this candle burns exclusively on pretension or PNC Bank was so self-conscious about earnestly charging 42,000 points for a hunk of glass that they deliberately wrote a misleading product description. Nowhere does it mention, for instance, that this fancy, "hand painted," "contemporary and classic" slice of the American dream is just a cup with some lines on it. The product name is equally as vague: "Orrefors Mine & Yours Hurricane." Considering that you'd need to spend around $15,000 on your credit card just to accrue enough points for it, I would be sorely disappointed if I ordered this and didn't get an actual hurricane in the mail.

Judging by the picture, it looks like maybe it's a beige sleeping bag with a tea light candle painted at the bottom, or else it's a translucent mattress hovering over a giant candle, both of which are far cooler than the actual product. And if you think I'm being too harsh by suggesting that PNC would intentionally try to confuse people into believing that this is anything other than trash, take a look at the same product as it's advertised on other sites.

Ebay.com

Seeing the base makes it much clearer that you're just looking at a lump of stupid, and so does the word "Lite" right in the product name, which PNC conveniently dropped. Still, the candle holder is almost $100, according to Amazon -- surely this thing is worth those 42,000 points, right? Well, no. Considering that most banks will offer $100 cash in exchange for every 12,000 to 17,000 points, this piece of schlock actually costs more than double what you would pay for it anywhere else. So enjoy your reward, PNC customers, you more than earned it.

#3. This Fucking Decorative Bead

As a man who doesn't wear any jewelry save that hemp necklace I regrettably auditioned in the early 2000s, I've never understood trinket culture. It's possible that this wingless bee with a massive hole in its abdomen is highly desirable among charm collectors, but on the other hand, anyone who accumulates bullshit like this shouldn't be allowed to have a credit card in the first place. For starters, it's anatomically incorrect, with only four legs and no thorax, so already American Express is trying to sell you lies. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it's objectively stupid. This is not just a lazy representation of a bee, it's a lazy representation of anything. Without the lines around its lower half, it could just as easily be a tiny golden alien, but, you know, a regal one.

Finally, it's not a full bracelet or a ring, it's one bead that would require over $60,000 in purchases just to get. It's easier to imagine someone buying this with the intention of melting it down and creating something worth owning than someone who exchanges reward points because they genuinely like this bee.